


embers & the night after

by snagov



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Falling In Love, First Time, Gardening, Healing, Heavy-handed religious metaphors, Javert Lives, Living Together, M/M, Post-Canon, Quiet, Self-Hatred, Sharing a Bed, Tenderness, the mortifying ordeal of being forgiven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26403001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: He is not wet. That is his first realization upon waking. His throat is raw and his muscles ache. When he sits, a headache washes over him and fatigue reigns. The room is dark, though a faint light shines through an open door opposite him. It’s merely cracked and the orange light flickers and dances, promising fire.There are only two possibilities through that door: Hell or Jean Valjean; Javert isn’t certain there’s a difference.
Relationships: Javert/Jean Valjean
Comments: 16
Kudos: 108





	embers & the night after

**Author's Note:**

> This is pulling from the novel and various films for characterization so it's a bit of a mix. Title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhR6lrdul64) by Bedroom Heroes.

Once, when he was a child, a priest wiped the dirt from his cheek and told him he smelt of piss and rot. _You were born in the arms of the gutter and you’ll die in the arms of the gutter too_ , the priest said, curling his fine nose at the smell and stepping back, pulling the hem of his robe up. Javert had been five or six then, with a sharp nose and straight black hair. He kept himself clean then, washing hard with lye soap and a rag, rubbing until his pale skin grew bright red and raw.

There’s a certain kind of panic when you’re running from something. Looking over your shoulder, either for a monster or a memory. He is running. Through his youth and his adulthood. He doesn’t want to be chased, so he learns to be the one in pursuit. When he leaves the gutter and washes his mother’s touch from his hands, he doesn’t look back. He hates the smell of it. Foul with dirt and drink, spit and vinegar. His skin peels when he dips it in near-boiling water, but at least he is clean.

Sometimes he holds his hands up to the sunlight, wondering what stories his mother might find in them. In his lifeline, his heartline. What does it say? He’s no fortune teller, the semiotic maps on his body are lost to him. He decides that they never meant anything at all. Away childish things, away falsehoods and lies.

At Toulon, he walked above the gutter and kept the rats in their cages. It’s a simple concept, give and take. For every crime, there is a punishment. Javert wears his coat proudly, the dark coat neat and perfectly tailored across his shoulders. When the prisoners try to climb the walls, he swats them down like flies. I’m not so different from a priest, he thinks. Tend to the flock, keep them in line. It’s a simple business. The world is cleaner that way. Better. Crime beggars punishment and he has a good eye for toes out of line.

When Jean Valjean watches him from the pit, Javert can see his own reflection in the dark eyes. In Valjean's eyes, he doesn’t look like a priest at all but a crow.

* * *

The water was cold.

It was cold when he splashed it on his face, walking away from his mother for the last time. It was cold when he jumped in the Seine. You might seek death but the body is animal, the body is fierce, the body wants to live. You will not rip life from your body so easily. He had fought to push the air from his lungs but his mouth wouldn’t open and his arms beat at the water, seeking the surface. Which way? Where is the surface? Where is the air? Up or down? Light or dark? Hold your breath and let go, see if you float. See which way the light comes. As the air leaves your body, the brain shuts down. The body is a home and the oxygen turns off the lights as it goes, darkening the house.

He is not wet. That is his first realization upon waking. His throat is raw and his muscles ache. When he sits, a headache washes over him and fatigue reigns. The room is dark, though a faint light shines through an open door opposite him. It’s merely cracked and the orange light flickers and dances, promising fire. There are only two possibilities through that door: Hell or Jean Valjean; Javert isn’t certain there’s a difference. He shifts. His clothes seem to be on the table next to him, dry and neatly folded. The shirt he wears now, soft and cream-colored, is not his own. Someone has dried and dressed him and put him to bed. How long has he slept?

“You’ve woken,” a voice says. Javert blinks, realizing that he has lost time again, dozing in this bed. His vision swims but it does not matter, it’s Valjean’s voice. He would know that voice and that shadow in the dark or the light, in the open air or the bottom of the sea. Anywhere, anywhere at all. He would know Jean Valjean to Kingdom Come.

Javert swears beneath his breath and slips into sleep again.

Running again. Always running.

* * *

Three months pass. Each morning, Javert wakes and tells Valjean he's leaving that day. Valjean always nods and tells him he will help Javert pack. They eat some bread and butter. Drink their wine. There's a little garden nearby and Valjean spends his days pulling at weeds and putting down roots. Javert comes and perches on a rock, watching quietly. Swans crowd a nearby pond. Pigeons drink from a pool of rainwater. One day, he takes up a shovel himself. 

“I could turn you in,” he says, looking up from the earth.

“You could,” Valjean agrees. His voice as placid as ever. Javert wants to take a rock and throw it into the pool of his stare, just to see the ripples. Just to make waves. It’s infuriating. 

“You do not believe I would.”

“I have no expectation, Inspector. Only an acceptance of either possibility.”

Javert looks at the rough, ruddy complexion of his cheek and the fall of his hair. Long now and silver. The color of stolen things. The color of thirty pieces. He wants to wrap his own skinny hands around that thick neck and strangle Valjean himself. He wants to kiss him. 

He does neither. 

“You’re filthy,” Javert says finally, leaning on his own shovel.

“You’re one to talk. Come here,” Valjean says, reaching out. Javert doesn’t hesitate, turning his face toward the open hand. Valjean wipes a smear from his cheekbone with a rough thumb. He laughs and it bubbles in Javert’s blood, bright and effervescent. They are standing too close, as close as man and wife. Javert wonders how he looks up close. He worries about his thin frame, his too-long hands. The crow’s feet at his eyes and severe profile. He worries that his lips are too narrow to kiss well, that his bony hips will bruise Valjean’s thighs. He worries that the hollow of his throat is too deep and dark, that his skin might be too cadaverously pale. For this is what it is, isn’t it? This is what it has always been. Javert looks at Jean Valjean and wants and wants and wants. The arms of the gutter, the gardener, the priest, the man himself. Strong and capable, curling like a cave around him and keeping him held tight. 

“You look at me now as if I’m a saint,” Valjean says, his voice tight.

“Aren’t you?” Javert asks. His eyes are hot. From shame? From terror? It’s impossible to know.

“I’m only a man.” Valjean shakes his silver head. Displeasure darkens his features. “Don’t put me on a pedestal. Don't saddle me with that.” 

“I would have sold you out for my position and my honor. And would have been paid handsomely for it, in reward for your capture. You are a saint to forgive such a thing.”

“There is nothing to forgive and I am no saint. I have done the crime accused and I would now serve my sentence, as I told you once.” 

“It would be unjust! You are a just man and I would have been rewarded in silver.” 

“I stole silver from a bishop once and he gave me my life.”

“It is not the same.”

“No,” Valjean agrees. “I would not wish to be a saint.” There’s an odd edge to Valjean’s voice. Banked heat, embers discovered beneath calm ash. Javert wants to find an iron and prod it, awaken the fire again. He finds himself watching Valjean, his dark eyes locked on Valjean’s own. Nearly the same shade of brown. Valjean is a careful, steady man, holding his chest steady, breathing deeply. For a moment, seeing how the late afternoon sun settles on the garden dirt and smudges on his skin and clothing, Javert remembers watching this same man emerge from the sewers, covered in filth and muck. The walls of the garden are high. Valjean licks his lip and Javert looks at the thin gleam of spit. How would it feel to lean forward these last few inches and close up the world between them? Would it be soft? Would Valjean bite and tear, would he snarl and take? Look at those steady, capable hands, brandishing a rake like a spear. He imagines how Valjean might press him into the spartan bed, parting his thighs like a sea. _I would follow you anywhere. I had given my life and you returned it to me. I would follow you across the country, through the deep. Into the sea. Into bed. Into death itself._

He has given his life and survived to tell the tale.

Javert’s mouth turns down into a pale, bloodless line. What is survival but loneliness? What is survival but being left behind? He is somewhere strange and lonely now. A land without laws. The world moves on outside. The tanneries still soak their hides in caustic lyes and mixtures. The bakers still dip their hands into bags of flour and raise loaves of bread and hot cross buns. The priests hear confession and the thieves still pilfer - yet, somehow here, it’s just the two of them. There _must_ be law; there _must_ be reason. If he were to reach for Valjean, to bend and cup his jaw with Javert’s own too-large hands, if he were to put his mouth against Valjean’s - what would the consequences be?

Even the Earth herself begs for order; gravity will cut the hanged man down. 

“Come,” Valjean says, brushing the dirt from himself. “It’s nearly supper. You could stand a meal.”

Javert watches him go and watches for a long while after. 

They are both covered in black soil. Javert has well-trained eyes for the look of grime. For unwashed hair and begrimed linen, for dirt beneath fingernails and behind ears. They are both covered but it’s a strange, healthy soil. The sort to plant a tree in, to put down roots. Javert has never dug a hole for a bulb before, never learned to separate soil from filth. He stares at his hands, spreading his fingers wide. They hurt from the exercise.

He has never expected pain to feel good.

Across the room, Valjean pulls his shirt from his head. His trousers still sit on his hips, but his chest and back are bare and pale now. There is a sharp line from where the sun touches him, shifting from tan to peach, like night to day. Sweat gleams across his still-powerful shoulders, running along the curves of his musculature like a lover. A bicep there, a tendon here. Javert has never been a man of culture, but he has been made to tour the Louvre twice, each time struck dumb and wide-eyed at Michelangelo’s _Dying Slave,_ left silent at the loving attention to detail. The gentle swell of the sculpture’s belly like Valjean’s own. The bulged muscle of his bent arm, the eyes closed and head slack, just like a man standing in his own room, bare-chested and eyes shut, exhaling a day’s work from his parted lips. There is a long scar from a laceration on Valjean’s right side, red and raised. Some scars are flat and as silver as fish, this one is violent. Javert hesitates, imagining how he might run a thin, curious finger over it. 

“Yes,” Valjean says. Javert startles. When he looks up, Valjean stands firm, dark eyes focused on him and the soiled shirt in his two hands. He reaches for Javert’s own. 

“I didn’t ask anything.”

“I know,” Valjean murmurs, taking the dirty laundry and putting it aside. Javert doesn’t have a clean shirt but finds one is pressed into his hands. It will be too large for him, just as the one before. It will smell like the cedar chest. He wonders how many of Valjean’s shirts he’s worn now. 

“Why yes?”

“You wondered if it hurt.”

Javert swallows. He had wondered a great many things but had not considered that. He didn’t need to, the landscape of the scar showed obvious hurt. No, he had wondered if it had happened at Toulon. If Javert himself had ordered it with his hawk voice. 

_Don’t be kind_ , he wants to say, but it would sound foolish out loud; Javert tries not to be a foolish man. 

He looks away, flushing. He should have looked away in the first place.

“You despise me," he says later, sitting at the table.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” He frowns, trying to add the numbers up and spit out a solution. He looks at the answer before him, Jean Valjean with a shirt held out. Jean Valjean, handing him a bowl of soup and a clean spoon. His eyes dark and warm. “Why wouldn’t you as a rational man? As a - a good man?” It doesn’t make sense. Crime beggars punishment. Cruelty beggars loathing. He has been incorrect and unjust. When will the judgment come?

He waits and bows his head like Abraham. Now will come the axe. 

“Don’t do the work of God yourself, Javert, I’m just a man. Leave the judging to Him.”

“I cannot.”

“Well, while you wait, eat.” Valjean pushes the bowl in front of him. A bowl he does not deserve; it tastes stolen. It tastes like beef broth and marrow bones, carrots and potatoes. He doesn’t say thank you but when he looks up, Valjean is smiling as if he’d heard it all the same.

* * *

_Am I not safe from your mercy?_

The water is wide here. He has followed the Seine for some time, looking out toward northward to where the Channel might lie. From here, far beyond his line of sight, a ship dots the far horizon, sailing onward toward the Atlantic. And from there, anywhere in the wide world. _There is nothing for me here._ He is older now. Wiser? No. Lost, perhaps. His eyes are black as spiders’ bellies and still cold. His nose is still straight and his chin as sharp as a knife. There is gunpowder grey at his temples and a tremor in his hands. When he looks at the water, it still promises fear and freedom. Today, however, he thinks not of drowning but sailing.

“We could leave,” Valjean whispers, walking alongside him. “We could go somewhere far away. Marseilles. Quebec. London.”

 _We would be different people there._ Different names in history. He imagines sharing a hansom cab on a street in London. The sky above grey and raining, the street a sea of dark coats and black hats. In the dark of the carriage, alone together, he might take Valjean’s hand and hold it tight. _Are you a man of God or of Satan,_ he wants to ask, looking at Valjean. The thought of the docks stretching out over the shore looms like the last temptation. Every kingdom of the world held out like a nameless possibility to live anonymously within. There had been a time once, blind and unformed, floating in the primordial ocean of his mother’s womb, when he had been nameless. Things had been simpler then.

The sun rises over a grey Parisian mist. Javert stands at the end of a path, packing a clay pipe. Valjean glances from the sun to Javert, something unknown in his expression. The sunlight is kind to him, lingering on his full face, the grey of his beard, his thick brows and strong nose. His tie and stock are dark, his waistcoat a deep blue. It reminds Javert of the river. Back to the river again. 

“I won’t be long.”

Javert nods. He watches as Valjean enters the church and waits here, at the edge, leaning against a lamppost. He crosses his arms. Smokes. Puts his pipe away. Bells chime and he looks heavenward, wondering what he might find there. The sky is blank and quiet, no answers are found written in the clouds. He doesn’t know what he expected. A year ago, the world had made sense. For every action, there was a consequence. He could look them up in the books of laws. In the laws of men, in the laws of God. He had been an arm of God. How would Valjean be praying now? There in the oak pew, bent neck exposed to the Lord above? His long grey hair tied back in a simple ribbon, falling against his shoulder? Valjean prays often and simply; Javert never knows what to make of him. 

A good man. Javert would have kissed him. Would have delivered him to the vipers’ nest and the lions’ den. 

His hands shake. 

* * *

They share Valjean's bed and never speak of it. The bed is wide and comfortable, Valjean turned away on his side, facing the wall. Whether Javert has watched him for minutes or hours, he cannot tell. The shoulders are too still, the breathing too even. When had he learned the pace of Valjean’s body? The sound of waking, the sound of sleeping, the music of a heartbeat? _Oh God, where are you? Oh God, where have you left me_ One bed, two pillows. Two places. Keep to the edge, keep to your side. Javert finds himself with his cheek pressed into the pillow and his teeth in his lip, one hand creeping toward the middle. _Catch me,_ he wants to say. _Catch me. You pulled me out. Which way is up? Which way am I going? (What will I find at the end?)_

He remembers the priest wiping the dirt from him in the gutter, pulling back in disgust. He looks at Valjean’s wide hands and strong fingers, remembering how he had washed the soil from Javert’s hands and feet when he had been too tired to stand, gently pulling a well-mended rag over his skin. In the arms of the gutter, the priest had said.

Valjean’s arms look strong and warm. I love him, Javert thinks, terrified; for we’re never afraid of our own lies, only our truths.

“What would you plant?” He asks.

“Hmm?” Valjean’s voice is clear and awake.

“In a garden of your own. If you could start from the beginning.” _Tell me a story, start from the beginning. Give me a man with a troubled past and a man with a troubled future. Give me an ending. Make it warm. Tell me there’s somewhere to go._

There is a long pause before Valjean speaks. “Ivy,” he says. “And roses, mainly. Her favorite.” Javert can hear the warmth in his voice, shaping his words around the thought of his daughter. Fair and rose-cheeked, freshly married. “Trees. Honey locust and linden. And golden alexanders, the wildflowers.”

He holds his breath. “The name my mother gave me.” _Alexandre._ He has been only Inspector Javert for so long, he’s half-forgotten his Christian name. No one uses it these days. No one at all.

“I know.”

“Why?”

“I like the way they look,” Valjean says. “They’re hardy plants that grow in the cold and damp before flowering in the spring.”

Javert is silent. He watches the moonlight through the edges of the drawn curtain and listens for movement in the hallway. Nothing. _Forgive me,_ chokes him, wild and deranged. He tightens his mouth into a firm, punishing line, pulling his hand away from the middle of the bed.

 _I don’t know how to love him,_ he tells his folded hands, tells God in his prayer. _But I know I love him._

A seal once broken is impossible to close. He has tried to shut the door against a wave, but the water comes through the cracks and takes the door from its hinges. There it is, once again, years of every memory of Jean Valjean. The strange, kind smile, the warm brown eyes. The cords of his wrapped muscle, the shiny lashes on his broad forearm. The shape of his thighs beneath his clothing. Who has loved you in the past, Jean Valjean? Man or woman? Who have you taken to bed, who have you held in your broad embrace? Do they know your spine, the gentle curve, the touch of scoliosis that shortens you?What is it like to enter you fully, your body stretching to accommodate theirs? Or do you take them, filling their body bright and hot as a fire after a long winter? _How would it go if I reached for you? Would you love me, would the love die? Like a cancer, the indifference growing and multiplying. Metastasizing to our daily lives, hopes, daydreams?_

His breathing is shallow. Javert holds very still, wondering what to say, what to do. Valjean is equally still. The shape of his body a shadow against the moonlight. In the little light, a dark blue, he can see their coats laid across the same chair. Their shoes mixed together at the door. Two valises, set down. Valjean’s hair spreads across the pillow; always loose while he sleeps. Javert is not a poetic man but he watches the silver river snaking toward him and can only think of treasures and stolen silver, of the flash of a saber and the glint of sun on a galvanized trowel.

“I would like if you used it.”

“Your Christian name?”

“Yes.”

There is silence again. Javert wants to spear his words and pull them back. “It’s a lovely name.”

Javert flushes. “My father’s.”

“As was mine.”

When Javert looks up, Valjean’s eyes are shining and he is smiling again. Two men bearing the strange weight of their fathers’ names upon their backs. Their history woven like a spiderweb between them. Like a scar. Yes, Javert thinks, like a scar. He had driven the lash between them, cutting the valley deep. It had bled for years and somehow, healed over.

When Javert’s hand creeps toward the middle of the bed again, Valjean’s is already there.

“Jean,” Valjean says. As if introducing himself. Javert swallows and gives a slight nod. _As if starting over, as if standing at the beginning again. Tell me there’s an ending._

“Pleasure to meet you,” Javert says quietly.

“And you, Alexandre.”

* * *

He dreams. There is a field and it is irrigated with red rivers, rivers running with blood. His body is strung up upon a tree, neck broken and flesh swelled to bursting. Flies swarm and crows pick at his eyes. Worms feast. Where his blood falls, nothing will grow. Look at the grey sky, look at the barren field. Look at the ditches, dug for the nameless dead. He had been nameless once. A strong hand cuts his body down and lowers him to the ground. Someone takes two fingers and closes his eyes. Someone wraps him in linen as a shroud. 

He wakes with his heart racing, wrapped in bed linens. The bed is soaked. He brushes a hand against the wet and looks at it in the faint starlight. It comes back clear: sweat, not blood.

A hand rests on his shoulder. It’s firm and Javert realizes he is shaking. There’s a black knot in him, down in his core. Where? In the stomach, the solar plexus? His nerves and veins, tangled in a knot. Something wet hits his shoulder. He blinks. His eyes are wet. He touches his damp cheek, bemused. There is a storm between his shoulder blades, an ache in his heart. (When was the last time he had cried? Remember, remember your mother, Javert. Remember standing at her graveside, the little stone marker you could barely afford. Remember the dirt they piled over your father, the dead man wearing the same name you wear now. Remember how you did not kneel, did not touch the grave for fear of coming back soiled. You had been clean then. Are you clean now?)

Time passes. A thumb gently rubs in careful circles over his shoulder. When Javert turns and looks, Valjean’s eyes are bright in the dark. Why do you struggle? Why do you wrestle? His arms are open. His mouth finds Valjean’s. It hurts. It is good. Like a tomato picked from the vine in the height of summer. Like salt directly on the tongue. Which way is up? It is dark and there are arms over him and under him, there is a thigh pressed against his own, cleaving between him as deftly as a butcher breaks apart a bird. When his eyes are open, the room is dark; when they are closed, he sees only bright bursts and gold light. _Kiss me_ , he begs. Perhaps he says it, perhaps he thinks it. His mouth finds Valjean’s again, blind and searching. What are the rules here? What can he touch? What can he say? Is God watching? The long arm of the law, does it belong here? The door to the room is shut and locked, there is no one but them. Valjean takes the ribbon from Javert’s hair and it falls loose and black over Javert’s bony shoulders. He wants to apologize for the mess, for the snarls and tangles, for everything he has not sorted out and made clean, but Valjean pulls a lock close and wraps it around his hand, kissing where the hair covers his knuckles. 

_Should I be above or below? Do you want me on my back or my front?_ The questions seem obvious at first but do not come. There’s no room for questions with their chests pressed close, bellies together, each laying on their side. Valjean’s cock is hard against his own and Javert cries out as Valjean takes them together in one slow, easy grip. He finds his own hand coming to cover where Valjean holds them tight. _Punish me,_ Javert wants to say. He had expected that if he did not say it, it would be something held back, jailed by his own tongue and teeth. Instead, his head falls back and his eyes squeeze shut and when he comes, his own mouth is open and panting, with nothing of punishment in it. 

_Please,_ he begs. _Please, please, please._

_(I’ve got you._

_Don’t let me go._

_I won’t._

_Kiss me again.)_

He is shaking. The bed is shaking. Is Valjean shaking? Perhaps. They rattle and rattle and come apart in each other’s hands. Sweat rolls down both backs. When he comes, the world is white behind his eyes. As white as the edges of the map. As white as the fog in a corner of Paris, crowding tight around a church he did not enter. As white as the edges of his vision when the oxygen disappears and the water presses in. As white as a blameless heart. As white as your name on the ledgers of the universe, for there is nothing there but what you write yourself. 

_(Forgive me._

_For what?_

_You know._

_No one is keeping track._

_Even God?_

_No.)_

“Jean, please, please, please - “ It’s his own voice. Javert flushes bright red, as red as a prayer book. Dark and mortified. He has come already, he should be rolling over into the dark. The sweat should dry on his back and he should pull his hands away. What is he reaching for? The world is amiss. Valjean’s hands still cover him. Valjean brushes his hair back and kisses his throat. His Adam’s apple, bobbing wildly. His blinking, unseeing eyes. His furrowed brow. He kisses like a benediction and Javert sobs finally. There it is, his voice. 

“I have you.” Valjean coaxes him, bringing Javert’s hands to his lips and kissing each knuckle. He catches his own breath. Somehow it is more flaying, more baring, than having his own hard cock cupped in another man’s hands. 

_I love you,_ the gesture seems to say. 

“Why?” He doesn’t understand. It doesn’t make sense. Crime deserves punishment. Valjean’s love, his kindness, is no punishment. Like the intense sweetness of a strawberry in full summer, the pleasure hurts. Here he is, wrapped in linens like a shroud, naked as the day he was born, naked as he will rise before God in the end, begging forgiveness. Held in the arms of the gutter. Jean Valjean, rising from the gutter, pulling him along. Why? What have I done to deserve you? He is afraid of a world without rules. Without logical consequences. If he can expect nothing, how can he expect to keep this? It might be stolen. It might be lost. It might disappear through no fault of his own. He would not expect it, coming home one day to find his heart and home empty, his love robbed blind. Who might you punish in a lawless land? What would you do?

"Shhh," Valjean murmurs, tightening his embrace. The touch is familiar, as if it has always been there. 

Please. He needs proof. _Tell me you love me, despite what I have done._

Valjean looks at him, tipping his chin up. His kiss is gentle and beard is rough. It leaves a burn on Javert’s clean-shaven chin. The ache is good. He wants more. “Please,” he begs. Please, please. When Valjean moves atop him, blocking the light, he is underwater again. He can taste the freshwater of the river but not the muck of the Seine. Where is the filth? This is sweetwater and he is drowning. It should not taste good but there is a beloved (wanted, needed, desired) tongue against his own and he is lost. He spreads his arms and legs as if on the rack, waiting to be broken at the seams. Waiting for a devil or a butcher. Valjean is gentle, opening him up with kind hands and careful touch. 

_I don’t deserve it._

_Hush._

When Valjean fills his body, whole and sound, safe and warm, he moves slowly and cautiously. Javert shudders, his prick pressed between them, hot and full again. When Valjean reaches for him, Javert wants to tell him to let it be, to punish him with no release. But the words don’t come and he spills in Valjean’s grip again, crying out. Valjean follows him into oblivion. 

He dreams. Let's look. Pull the curtains back, pull the night back. Look closer. It is a white, pale sky. Javert is running across a barren countryside. A small house appears, built only of shale and mud. There is wine at the table and enough bread for two. A garden out the back door. When he steps outside, the long grasses brush at his legs. Flies and bees flit about, swallows and magpies call from the boughs of tall trees. The poplars are green now. The aspen, the holly, the hawthorn, the pine. A warm sun shines through the dark wool of his waistcoat, browning his revealed skin. His black hair, in the bright light, gleams a dark chestnut instead. A man stands in the center of the garden with warm, dark eyes and a silver beard, planting yellow flowers. 

He is no longer running.


End file.
